face straight out a magazine

Jon Snow is five years old when the dark of his gaze is highlighted with strange flashes of purple. Catelyn is sitting by the fire and the light hits his eyes at an odd angle and suddenly she knows. She knows that Jon is not truly Jon Snow, not really. Ned does nothing to clear his name either, the regretful expression on his face as he sits under the weirwood telling Catelyn all she needs to know.

Her protests about being made out as a fool are tempered by Ned’s argument, and soon she learns the whole story behind Jon’s parentage. The boy she hated as an infant, the one who was a constant reminder of all she had failed at, was a reminder of something more: the love that broke a country. When she sees Jon again, Catelyn almost feels pity for the child. If Winterfell knew, if the world knew that Jon was not Ned’s bastard as many believed… well, they would have another war on their hands.

Catelyn had never met Lyanna, but the books of Winterfell told about a lively girl with dark, curled hair and a smile that could charm anything. Certainly it had charmed two of the most important men in history - Robert Baratheon and Rhaegar Targaryen - and Lyanna herself had given birth to perhaps the man with the best claim to the Iron Throne and the North itself. Her shivers grew cold at that.

When she looks closer, the Targaryen in Jon makes itself evident. His hair - always compared to Ned’s, but it actually bore a striking resemblance to Lyanna - was dusted with streaks of a white blond, and the very tips were the shade of blond that the Targaryens were known for. If one knew what to look for, Catelyn surmised, all the clues were there. Whilst Stark blood ran strong and true through Jon’s veins, there were still hints of the man his father was in him. Rhaegar Targaryen. Sometimes Catelyn almost had to laugh - Jon Snow, but not really.

⇐⇒

Jon Snow is ten when someone comments about the remarkable cleverness of his words. None of Catelyn’s children are simple, but there is something different about Jon. His mind moves with the speed only someone gifted possesses, and when the old maester from the capital mentions that his thoughts remind him of the late Targaryen line, Catelyn’s blood chills.

She assures the maester that it was all the Stark blood in him, that the Northerners were no slackers, but she sees it herself. Catelyn met Rhaegar Targaryen at the tourney at Harrenhal, and she found that the prince was as quick with his jests as he was with betraying his wife and ‘abducting’ Lyanna. Jon evidently had his father’s wits, and there was nothing Catelyn longed more than to tell him to be careful.

The Maester accepted her stammered arguments that Ned’s blood flowed through him, but later found her and her lord husband in the midst of a shouting match. If Ned had just told her, if he hadn’t taken the fall for Rhaegar and Lyanna, if there had not been the great tourney… Catelyn argues that Jon endangers all of them, and Ned reluctantly agrees. But there is no other place to send him, and so Jon remained at Winterfell, still a Snow.

She cannot help but look at him closer, when his head is turned or he’s busy doing something else. As he grows older, all the signs are there - the blond growing through thicker, the purple of his eyes just more evident, the pale skin that belies his Stark heritage, and the cleverness with his words that have different bites to them than Robb’s japes. Catelyn longs to tell him, to get rid of the secret she’d been keeping for five excruciating years, but she knows that it would break their fragile peace she’s been attempting to build.

Jon was too young to remember her hatred of him. As an infant, he was a reminder that she had failed Ned, and that he had not loved her enough to be faithful, and she despised every moment his care was entrusted to her. His youth was of great contrast to Robb, who Catelyn could never get enough of. Once, she saw the both of them lying together as babes; one dark haired, one red haired, but the same age. The Bastard of Winterfell and the Lord of Winterfell, but mere babies. It struck her that maybe she was wrong to hate him - but then Jon would cry and Robb wouldn’t, and Catelyn would go back to loving her son just a little more.

But when Ned told her, or rather she guessed his parentage herself, her feelings about Jon changed. Perhaps it wasn’t a simmering hate, but there was still a vein of something else in her casual regard of the boy. He could not be blamed for his parents’ sins, Catelyn knew that much, but she looked at Jon and saw the catalyst that could split the fragile Seven Kingdoms. All that, all the chaos and fury and the scorned love of Robert Baratheon rested on this- this child’s shoulders, and lived under her roof.

⇐⇒

Jon is fourteen and leaving for the Wall when Catelyn pulls him aside. At long last, after nine years of carrying her secret about his family, Ned had told her that perhaps it was time. He was no longer a boy now, and before he took the black would be the best time. The window panes of the solar were frosted with the chill of a winter, and Jon seemed nervous.

He ran a hand through his hair - the blond, she saw, the Targaryen blond - when she told him. Ned was busy, rallying the men for King’s Landing, but she wished he was there to tell him. Catelyn had never seen the flash of emotions that ran across Jon’s face before; she found anger first, then sorrow, then curiosity. Jon’s rage was justified after all, he was raised a bastard but now being told he was… he was a prince.

She had never given him his full title, but now she did. The boy’s eyes widened as she recounted Prince Aegon Targaryen, Son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark, Lord of Dragonstone, and Catelyn almost laughed. From bastard to prince was a high jump, and to find out that your name wasn’t even yours was a world-breaking revelation. The tears stung Jon’s eyes but he didn’t say anything.

Afterwards, when the procession to the Wall and the marchers to King’s Landing are long gone, Catelyn will remember the furious strength in his eyes. Jon told her he was grateful, for raising him in her home knowing who he was, and that he would never forget that. When he told her, You have my word, Catelyn almost cried herself. He was so painfully a Stark, but the steely anger in him bore resemblance to his Targaryen ancestors. No longer Jon Snow, but Aegon Targaryen. Times changed.

⇐⇒

Jon is twenty when he returns home to Winterfell. Everything has changed now, and people do not know him as Jon Snow anymore. He is either Lord Commander Snow, or Jon Targaryen. Given that he forsook all familial ties when he became a brother of the Night’s Watch, telling his close friends his father was Rhaegar and his mother Lyanna was easier. Robert Baratheon was dead, Ned Stark was dead, his brother…. Robb was dead, and Catelyn Stark was dead too. Slain at her own brother’s wedding, done like the oathbreakers Walder Frey and Roose Bolton were.

Catelyn was a constant in his childhood, Jon realises. When it was suppertime and the children were hungry, Catelyn was there. She never spoke more than a few words to Jon, but he knew she looked at him differently than the rest of her children. He had always assumed it was because he was a bastard, and her husband’s one at that, but when he was fourteen and she told him who he really was he knew. She had looked at him differently because he wasn’t Jon Snow at all.

Six years at the wall was a long time to come to terms with his parentage, and Jon spent many waking moments dwelling the books in Maester Aemon’s library about all things Targaryen. Aemon, it turns out, knew too. Ned Stark had trusted the old maester, and so he revealed himself as one of Jon’s only living family. Sometimes he tasted the name in his mouth - Jon- no, Aegon Targaryen. Prince of the Seven Kingdoms. Lord of Dragonstone. All these names and titles, given to a once-bastard boy of Winterfell.

Samwell Tarly had told him he had the clearest claim to the Iron Throne since Aegon the Conqueror took it for himself. Jon, at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, hadn’t really pieced that puzzle together, but when he thought about it more it made sense. He did. If the laws of succession and inheritance still remained, with Robert Baratheon dead they left Jon as the King of the Seven Kingdoms. He would be King, but to rule the Seven Kingdoms was to sign one’s own death warrant, and he didn’t want that at all.

Sansa knows who he really is. She was the one that was least like a sibling to him, the one he hardly ever knew - it was wilful Arya that Jon was closest with - but now Sansa is the only one left. Bran is off being something called the ‘Three-Eyed Raven’, Robb is dead, Arya is missing and Rickon… he is dead too. Ramsay Bolton with his sadist attitude had shot his youngest brother in the back. They are all gone, and Jon and Sansa are the last ones left.

She declares that he is King in the North, just as Robb was before him, and Jon doesn’t have the heart to tell her that all the Kings in the North have died. Sansa would counter with, Not Torrhen Stark, but Jon is no kneeler. His time with the wildlings taught him that courage is strength, and some things are worth dying for. Perhaps Winterfell is not the castle he’ll die in, though.

⇐⇒

Jon is twenty four years old when he meets his closest living kin at King’s Landing. Daenerys Targaryen, the Mother of Dragons and Breaker of Chains, sits upon the Iron Throne like she was born to rule after vanquishing Cersei Lannister in a deadly battle that scorched most of the city. He sees the blond of her hair and the purple of his eyes, and instinctively he knows that this is what his father looked like. His father would have hair the same colour as Daenerys, and the same eyes, because he was her brother.

He tells her that he will not kneel. The North, led by him as King, will not bow to another ruler save for one of their own. Daenerys laughs first, but then grows serious when she realises she is not jesting. After a long eventuality, she agrees. She says it’s because of their shared blood, and who was she to deny a Targaryen their wishes? Privately, Jon dislikes being called a Targaryen like that is all he is. True, Rhaegar was his father, but Lyanna was his mother, and she was a Stark, and he grew up in the frozen North. He is proud to be more than part-Valyrian, proud to be of the North.

In public Daenerys acts like they are purely two rulers meeting each other, but she seeks him out afterwards and asks to know everything he recalls about Rhaeger. He tells her truthfully that he knows nothing (wincing at his words) but recounts all Maester Aemon shared and the details in Castle Black’s archives. Together, with what little Viserys told his sister about Rhaegar, they piece together the story of a love-struck prince, an unwise choice, and the birth of an heir. Rhaegar is unknown by both of them, but the Lord of Dragonstone lives still through stories.

Daenerys announces the next day that she is Queen of the Six Kingdoms and all that entails. Sansa is still in the North, holding Winterfell as warden in Jon’s stead, but a raven will reach her in due time. Jon sits alone in the godswood, the part of the Red Keep that Daenerys did not burn, and thinks. He is a King now. He is King in the North, and he will be remembered as too many things to count. 998th Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch; Lord Snow; the Bastard of Winterfell; Lord of Dragonstone; Rhaegar’s son; Jon Targaryen; and now, King in the North.

He, the boy from Winterfell who took the black, who fought the White Walkers, who died and came back to life… Jon realises that Sam will write his deeds in the books of history, and that some day people will read about him. The bastard-born outcast turned Targaryen prince. It was, he thought wryly, like something from one of Sansa’s fairytales. Only dreams happened to those who could fulfill them - but Jon was on top of the world.